After changing, washing his face, and going down to the dining room, Sora found Shiori (now a bit more clothed) and Yuu finished with the cooking and ready to eat. They all sat down and enjoyed the meal.
On the menu this morning was a rather large ground-beef steak with an equally large amount of rice, a sunny-side-up egg, some salad, and a cup of corn soup. It was a lot for the first meal of the day, but Sora and Shiori were both undergoing a growth spurt, so they both had no problem tucking away this much each morning. Yuu, meanwhile, must have already eaten at her place, because she was just nibbling on a leaf of lettuce from the large salad bowl.
Family breakfasts these days often tend to be focused on nutrition, filling stomachs without costing a lot or taking a while to make, but in the Hashima residence, someone made a home-cooked meal almost every day. Sora could cook as well, although not quite as well as Shiori, and their parents both enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen when they had the free time. Unlike writing novels, cooking was a vocation that let you enjoy (i.e. eat) the results pretty quickly after you started working on it, so as they put it, it was the best hobby a writer could have. Their kitchen was large, featuring an island in the middle with ample cooking space on it, so several people could prepare their food at once.
“Oh, hey, it’s my sister.”
Shiori stopped eating for a moment. Sora followed her eyes toward the news program on the living-room screen. It showed Chihiro Hashima, Shiori’s sister and Sora’s other aunt.
“You’re right,” he said. “When was Aunt Chi coming back again?”
“I don’t know,” Shiori replied.
Through his family, Sora was acquainted with quite a number of distinguished people—his parents, Nadeshiko, Makina Kaizu (Yuu’s father and a very popular writer), Kaiko Mikuniyama (aka the “Mother of Panties Manga”), Miyako Shirakawa (the go-getter president of a publishing agency), the actor Yuma Takashina, and so on. But Chihiro was by far the most household name among them.
Chihiro Hashima—thirty-four years old—was an astronaut. After carrying out many missions and setting assorted records as the youngest astronaut to perform this or that procedure in space, her achievements (and her beauty) had made her an international celebrity. Her autobiography, released last year, easily outsold anything Itsuki Hashima or Nayuta Kani had published up to now, and in it, she revealed for the first time to the public that she pretended to be a boy around her brother and his friends for several years. The response was predictably massive, to the point that journalists and photographers staked out her family home for a while.
She had been living on the International Space Station for the past two-ish months. When Sora asked when she was “coming back” just now, he meant back to Earth.
“She sure is something, isn’t she?” Shiori said, looking a little disinterested as the screen showed her sister smiling and waving as she spun around in zero gravity.
✦ ✦ ✦
After the three of them finished breakfast, Shiori took her high-tech bicycle—a trendy model, packed with safety features and eco-friendly nods—to high school, Sora and Yuu going by foot to their middle school. A few minutes on the road, and they started seeing more boys and girls from the same schools.
Well before it became a national trend in Japan to do away with school dress codes—in fact, back when Sora’s aunt Chihiro was still a student here—this middle school allowed students to wear whatever they wanted. But while a lot of their fellow students were dressed for comfort in rough, casual gear, Yuu’s dress stood out as fancy and perfectly designed as a cosplay outfit. With her small size and well-defined facial features, she looked like a cute doll in her dress. Whenever she and Sora were walking together, they could hear jealous strangers whispering things like “Why her?” and “They don’t go together at all.”
This negative feedback, of course, was mostly thrown at Yuu, and there was a good reason why people said things like “why Sora Hashima” and “she doesn’t go together with Sora Hashima at all.” That’s because Sora Hashima was an incredibly handsome young man, one who would humble most any beautiful young girl he was with. His eyes were a pure blue, his hair silver like his mother’s, and his face both gentle and noble. His voice was on the cutesy side as a kid, much like voice actor Hisako Kanamoto, but it had broken recently and now he had a more mature, attractive one, like voice actor Yusuke Kobayashi.
He had been approached on the street by modeling or talent agencies more than once, and when his aunt Shiori told people “I’m in love with my brother,” people weren’t repulsed—they accepted it. If it’s him, who can blame her? He looked like a prince from a shojo manga who had burst out of the pages and into real life; plus, he was the son of two famous, charismatic writers, lived in a huge mansion, had more money than he knew what to do with, and was the nephew of astronaut Chihiro Hashima. It’s fair to say that Sora Hashima was a pretty special child from the moment he was born.
“Why her?” “They don’t go together at all.” “Who’s that stunted little girl with him?” “He’s happy with that?” “What a weird outfit.”
…The assorted negative feedback that landed in Sora’s ears was naturally overheard by Yuu next to him as well, but she didn’t twitch an eyebrow. In fact, she relished it, holding Sora’s arm and keeping her body close to his.
Being so close to Sora like this had made Yuu the target of slander and harassment at school. Some of it was pretty cruel, in fact, but Yuu fought back against all of it, not hesitating to use high-tech gadgets and even the services of lawyers and detectives she knew via her parents’ work contacts. The ringleader of the bullies who had troubled her was driven out of her school entirely, and she had gotten a rep as someone not to mess with. Nobody dared try to directly pick on her, instead being content with calling her names from afar.
But with Sora being positioned this “bad girl’s” boyfriend, she was serving as a kind of seawall keeping others away from him. Having known her since they were infants, he didn’t dislike her at all, but there were no feelings of romance on his part at all. He did want to have a girlfriend, but if any girl stepped up to date him, she’d doubtlessly receive the sort of abuse Yuu took in the past. So these two strong-willed childhood friends pretended to be a couple in public. Yuu knew full well that Sora had no romantic feelings for her, but she also knew he didn’t want anyone to be hurt because of him, and she took advantage of that to stay close to his side.
It was, to be frank, a pretty twisted relationship, and Sora constantly dreamed about having a normal teenage social life instead of what he had at the moment. He didn’t want to be born as this special presence. He wouldn’t have minded being born with normal looks, not having all these outstanding achievements, not becoming the target of bullying, playing with friends like normal, and maybe dating the fifth-cutest girl in his homeroom—that kind of extremely non-dramatic life. He had no intention of being the protagonist of the sorts of high school romcoms and teenage dramas his parents wrote.